


The Ides

by dosymedia



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Anal Sex, Character Death, Double Anal Penetration, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Poetry, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-24
Updated: 2016-07-24
Packaged: 2018-07-24 16:50:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7515820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dosymedia/pseuds/dosymedia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel is dead, but Dean refuses to let him go. He makes a supernatural pact to bring him back from the dead, but there’s a catch -- he may only be resurrected on the ides of each month.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ides

**Author's Note:**

> This was written to fill "24 hours to live" for Trope Bingo. All of the tags mentioned are pretty vague, so apologies if they and/or the rating are misleading.

**January**

At first he stumbles a little downstream, surprised

by the current’s push as he

wades in deep enough for his

jeans to stick to his legs.

He closes his eyes,

says the words, chanting

as he draws the knife from his waistband

and cuts into the crooked life line of

his left palm. The scarlet flow

forms a maelstrom around 

his knees. He draws his hands into the swirling waters

and feels for the body beneath.

Like a fish caught on a line, it wriggles through his fingers

once,

twice,

before he catches it,

pulls on it,

swabs thick sloops of mud from its emerging surface

until the thing gasps into new life.

The pale skin shines between patches of slick brown and

in his face two bright eyes flash in

the morning’s first stretch like

panned zircon, sifted and rubbed clean.

 

“Dean, let me go,” are

the first words he says after clearing his throat of sludge.

“This is not natural. The order — life and death,

I’m stuck between. I cling to what isn’t mine — ”

 

Pout lips push unsaid words back into

the dirt grime at the base of his esophagus,

“Forget the order,” Dean says, “I revised it.”

And there is no more talk

about what should have been.

They are content with what is:

Dean folded around his shivering form

until the larks tire of celebration.

 

**February**

“Come off it,” Dean says, but

fascination has already set in and he

is perplexed by the puzzle given. So, instead

he asks twenty-one questions into Dean’s bruised ribs.

Does it fly?

No.

Does it have long teeth?

Yes.

Poison?

Yes.

It is the vetala -- _interesting._

“What is?” Dean asks.

That he once dispatched such things without

such grievous injury,

but now…

And even when Dean speaks of

bad days and strange luck and

“only a matter of time,”

he knows to scratch at the bruise a little,

to press him until he lets slip the tiny word,

“Alone.” It’s then that he asks

of the brother unseen and unheard of.

“Sam…he’s sick.” 

Then there is no need of questions;

it explains everything.

 

 

**March**

The river is so full after the fifth day of rain,

that it spits him out like a

bottom-dwelling fish to flop in its new marshland.

Round, pale eyes seek their lover’s and find that the

evidence of his slip-up, the

scabs lining his jaw, have gone,

but the weight of his loneliness has marked him;

the creases in

Dean’s face have deepened as if dug out by nimble hands.

As Dean washes him, the grass sulking

underneath cascading handfuls of the river,

he watches the furrows soften, then

harden into bold lines.

“He isn’t getting better.”

Green eyes, made greener by the

budding springtime, crosses the landscape

of fair skin to meet his.

He doesn’t say, but the fleeting anger

that instead becomes a

glance to the

drowning grass blades tells him that

Sam isn’t getting better.

 

**April**

After repeated exclamations —

“I’m worried about you.

“You don’t think I miss him?

“He was my friend.

“I loved him too.”

— The blood is drawn and

from the roiling river he

comes to wade overgrown grass

and share in the surprise of the

mammoth, snotty-nosed younger brother

hiding tears behind his shirt sleeve.

 

Sam is catalogued and labelled in silence before

he pulls him

to his shoulder where

his stubble scratches the back of his neck.

Sam tells him he smells like a sodden dog.

It’s the first time that any of them laugh in a while.

Underneath an inland willow Sam lays against his side

on a picnic blanket.

Sam’s touch is tentative, unconvinced that he isn’t

an apparition of his own making, a fever dream of

his brother’s trust and of his friend’s continued existence.

Wiping the dirt from his cheek doesn’t get Sam closer to

certainty, but he decides he’ll enjoy his fantasy

if it is one. 

 

A damp kiss erases Sam’s ingrained pain all at once and

Dean wonders why he tried so hard to delay this moment.

 

The rain limps then tires, coming and going in soft bouts

while he kisses the prominent bow of Sam’s collar and Sam

sticks his nose into his spiky hair

to breathe him in like a clean gust of wind.

It’s only when he exhales that he realizes

he’d been suffocating,

slowly,

all the while. His lips

find corded heat past the landmarks of

Sam’s extenuated torso. He wraps his

lips around him, taking Sam in long sips

before swallowing him whole. Dean

makes his nipples bud using lewd provocation,

his lips worship and encourage and then add

salty little threats in whispers.

 

Brilliant color dashes through his vision

as they ease into him together,

bare

and slicked from spit

and pressing kisses like fire onto his

shoulder,

neck,

and chest

to mimic the slow burn of their coordinated push and pull.

They say small words of love

and of love

until they fill him

and when they lay together, him

between brothers,

the light stretching bands of a faded rainbow over

their desperate hands,

he tells them to love each other

while they can.

When they miss him they hold each other

and whisper words of love

and of love

in the hollow of their necks.

 

 

**May**

Between intermittent static,

the host posed a question:

could there _be_ such a flower

in the untamed jungles of Mexico? A

flower that marks the

feet of the dead. A

flower that feeds upon human life to

purchase its own?

The History Channel believes.

Virgin sacrifice of

heathen beauties are buried

underneath the prim white petals

of a flower that blossoms in the moon light.

Dig the flower out and its roots, scarlet

like cut veins,

are entwined around the remains of its host.

To pluck this flower whole

and milk it of its sustenance is said

to be life-giving, life-ending, life-changing.

“We did not make _that,”_ he says,

to which Sam hums, a tired chuckle kept behind

closed lips. His eyes are too heavy to open, his

breath too labored to speak.

The box springs hesitate as Dean sighs out a silly hope

and

turns from the commercial break.

 

**June**

“Show me, where he rests.”

God rays douse the place behind the

western oak in golden light.

Overtaken by the Kansas grass is Mary and John,

flat slabs of stone engraved and graced by

a single yellow flower,

a single silver bullet. 

Then Sam lays fresh and

flowerless and bulletless, instead

with a thick book Dean’s only heard about a few

hundred times while at the wheel of the Impala.

When his hand is given,

Dean takes it and

shows his hurt in a smile.

 

**July**

With his nose digging into Dean’s

whiskey flannel, he says,

“Don’t follow too quickly,

because I am not where you left me.”

Dean only holds him tighter under

noon’s burnt bulb.

He gets the feeling like he knows.

 

**August**

In the late summer his grave is

a kiln and he emerges from the waters

baked all the way through.

His only word is,

“Dean.”

Brows furrowed, nose pinched.

His voice, like compact gravel,

rakes the bruised skin underneath those eyes.

He places a kiss on the dark shadows

and frowns

when they remain.

 

**September**

Fall winds across the cuff of his ears,

“Chilly,” he says into Dean’s neck.

Dean’s hand cups the bony shill of his shoulder,

“the leaves are coming in,”

but he means the leaves are going.

They’re the color of supermarket oranges,

vibrant only by comparison.

 

**October**

Dean chants apologies to

enliven him,

his creature.

In the autumnal

orange filtering through a thick haze,

crinkles in Dean’s eyes form, grasping for words as

the mud in the shallow graves of his

nails stick to his skin like crescent moons.

“All time is borrowed,” and he cannot be displeased

by less debt on his account.

 

He cards the first trace of grey in Dean’s temple,

then sees the cut from grey to ear.

“Again?”

“Coyote.”

“You promised, no more.”

“I’m alright, I’m careful.”

Squinting and incredulous, “I know what you mean

by careful,” he says.

“Just once can we skip this part?”

In response, he gives

a little shake, “This part is sacred,” he says as

he acquaints himself with

the fat spread across Dean’s muscled belly, his fingers

pass over the soft mound and go

down,

into the hairs lain flat underneath tight denim.

 

Dean sweeps the

coarse pads of his fingers into

the curve of his back, catching on the

knot that magicks

a wash of flustered pink from nipple to nose,

A soft whine for deeper touch is buried into

Dean’s collar as he

smiles, thin,

“the days between these moments,

are more painful than

the teeth of a dog or

trickster god

preying on a local congregation.

Nothing will

keep me from seeing your

eyes,

so fuckin’ bright,

cut through sloughed earth,

to return the pieces of myself

I’ve long forgotten.”

 

 

**November**

There is another scar, that

he traces with the scuffed skin of

his forefinger and

thumb.

That he kisses with tender lips, that

he brushes with nose and chin,

but does not mention

between slats of rose dawn,

the television buzzing in the background.

 

**December**

Maggots call the pieces of Dean left behind their home as

the twilight hours break over his brow’s beaded sweat.

He staggers to the spot where

the willows interweave above, dripping

blood from open wounds into the water.

A susurrous incantation gives his lover form.

 

Tawny yellow light edges the overgrown horizon,

weak and reaching as

Dean shudders his breath into his mud-slicked neck.

He pins what remains of Dean against

the slope of the river banks, stalwart

against the wretch and wheeze of his decline.

He cannot bring himself to call Dean careless.

Idiotic.

Reckless.

Oafish.

Instead he finds what little is left unscathed

and milks it,

swooning into the gentle curve of Dean’s ear.

 

_I love you,_

_I love you._

 

The sun rises above the weeds,

breaks across his skin to

flay flesh from bone.

 

 _I love_ _…_

 

Dean lays in the ashes of him, eyes

unblinking in the warmth of the new day.

 

In the year that follows,

thick bushes hedge the river,

dots of white unfurl in

the moonlight into

lovely orchids.


End file.
